EDITOR’S NOTE:

A lifetime ago, I moved from Los Angeles to rural Northern California on a whim. I knew no one. I was to find it a desolate experience, living in an unheatable (freezing) house, without internet or cell-phone connection. Remarkably, Jamie McHugh was one of my few neighbors. I met him one evening in San Francisco at a cocktail reception for his remarkable photographs.

A few gray days later as I trudged forlornly up the steep hill that led to my house, I heard a banshee-like screeching on the road behind me.  It was Jamie, furiously pedaling his ten-speed up the sharp incline, hooting and whooping a rain-drenched, joyous Pomo-Celtic (?) dialect presumably of his own invention, punctuated with ear-splitting wolf-whistles of appreciation. Tall in the saddle, he spun around me several times on his bike like a rodeo trick-rider, head thrown back and face offered up to the ever-present drizzle, then rode off in a clap of thunder. Crows and hawks overhead mirrored his circles and vocalized. I laughed for days, and waited for our next encounter.

Jamie has graciously agreed to share some of his thoughts and remarkable images, excerpted here.

Thank-you, Jamie, and godspeed on your next adventure.

--Victoria Thomas 

BEGINNING WITH THE BODY

I am first and foremost a somatic movement specialist. My work has centered around dance, movement, and expression for the past 45 years, taking me into a variety of situations from being an artist-in-residence in public schools, to working with people with HIV and cancer, to leading training programs for students of the somatic-expressive arts. My approach - Somatic Expression® - brings the living body forward into awareness, highlighting our inner body senses of proprioception and interoception. "Somatic" means I work from the inside out with intrinsic, felt and sensed movement as opposed to specific forms or structures of movement practice. I'm interested in understanding the life of our creaturely body, as an ecosystem in relationship to all life. 

Our best teachers of movement are infants, young children, and animals; watch how they move and inhabit themselves. There's no artifice or posturing, they are simply becoming their own nature propelled by curiosity, desire, sensuality, and intimacy with one's own self and the environment. Naturally, we get conditioned out of that "original grace" as we get older to fit in, adapt, take our membership in cultural tribes; and yet, that absence from our own nature, prioritizing our health and well-being, can create varying degrees of distress, discomfort, inhibition, and even disease. How can we reclaim our body as a body? How do the indigenous technologies of breath, vocalization, contact, stillness and movement support and further our essential nature? Go here for a video description of these five technologies: https://player.vimeo.com/video/170979436

I'm also an interdisciplinary artist dedicated to the aesthetic exploration, and integration of the inner and outer landscapes. My primary visual discipline is photography, which I've been pursuing for the past 50 years of my life. 

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

From my perspective, Ansel Adams already did the big, fabulous, panoramic landscapes - it's been done. So what is my unique vision and contribution? What do I see that's of interest and can speak to people’s curiosity? I'd say my goal as an artist -- and as an educator -- is to heighten, educate and cultivate people's sense perceptions. Of course, not only their visual perception, but also their auditory, tactile and, in particular, their kinesthetic perception. 

And when we blend these various perceptions together, we truly have not only an aesthetic experience, but a compelling human one as well.  My interest lies primarily in capturing the small-scale world, the aspects of the environment that are often unnoticed or overlooked. I like taking a small part of the landscape, and enlarging it, creating a bit of an abstraction. My regular printing size is 20x30 or 30x48, yet my favorite size is 40x60 as they capture attention and make a grand statement. I used to take photographic prints and have them mounted on an aluminum substrate with a recessed back frame and a UV-laminate covering. The image would just float on the wall, unencumbered by the boundary of matting or a frame. Because of this approach, people very often can't tell if they're looking at a photograph or a painting. (Because the technology has gotten so much better in the past 10 years, I now print directly on aluminum as it is more cost-effective and impermeable to damage, making it easier to place work in public places.)  

And when I'm photographing water in particular, I get drawn into its elusive and transient nature, challenging me to find just the right angle to capture that quicksilver moment. In many contemplative traditions, there is a visual image to gaze upon, whether it's the geometric design of a Yantra, or a statue of the saints or a stained glass window. Those images are places to let attention settle. The same thing can be done with the natural world: go out in the world for a walk. When you see something that captures your attention for whatever reason, stop, take three breaths and tether your attention to that object, that point of focus, and then move on. Punctuating the movement of your life with pauses is not only a good way to invite aesthetic experience into view, but it is also good medicine for the soma.

Photography is the way I paint; I can't paint or draw, but I can use the camera as an extension of not only my eye, but my whole body as if it was an appendage. Taking photographs for me is a meditative/contemplative practice, a way that I harness my consciousness into a small frame. And that focus is balanced out by wandering - if I'm out in the field, I will look at something for awhile, really get into exploring and focusing; and then when I feel done, I'll put my camera down, I might lay down, or look up at the sky, bring attention to my breath or move a bit so I can recalibrate. 

This focusing and wandering is a rhythm of attention and dreaming. And this back and forth rhythm allows me to sustain my attention and enter into a very different state of consciousness, one that is more attuned to my inner and outer landscape. 

When I first started doing these large-scale pieces in 2007-2008, I really wanted them to be in healing centers, particularly in hospitals, and I ended up doing a show at a hospital in Berkeley. Some months later I met a woman doctor at a different opening who recognized my work, and said she worked on one of the units there. Whenever she needed to take a pause, she would come down to where my work was hanging, sit in front of an image for 10 minutes, reset and then go back to her work.  

ON THE NATURAL WORLD

Nature for me has always been a healing force. Starting really young, we used to go out to my grandparents farm when I was growing up in DC or we'd go to the ocean and body surf all day. Movement and nature have been my sweet spot of feeling free alive. I was never one for organized, competitive sports. I just like to move movement that felt good that made me feel alive. My version of a meditation retreat is to go into the wilderness by myself for a week and not speaking, simply being in movement and stillness, letting the forms, colors, shapes, textures, the whole shebang of the natural world, carry me away into a settling and renewal. 

I have lived rurally for so many years, and realize how privileged I am of being able to really surround myself with the elemental life, the life of the natural world, which of course, all of our ancestors going back many millennia experienced; urban areas are a pretty recent innovation. I see myself as an emissary of the natural world through my art: to bring the frequency of nature into cities and share that encapsulated, aesthetic moment into people's living and working spaces. It's why I continue to do the work I do to make nature more accessible to people. One aspect of this accessibility is a project I began in 2016 after the election. Many people were glued to their computers, in states of shock, upset and distress. I asked myself living out in the country, well, what could I do from afar to help ease the collective anxiety? How could I be of service? I decided to make 7 Days of Beauty, a series of five minute videos with slow dissolves of my images with different pieces of music as a way to slow things down - slow the mind down, slow the breath down, take a pause, and reset. My friend Francine Shapiro, who created a somatic approach to treating trauma (EMDR), recognized the value of this offering and relayed it to her dare of therapists. And that inspired me to continue this practice of online video creation, particularly in service of people who didn't have the resources to purchase art. So after 7 Days of Beauty, I started to create longer videos (The Breathing Room Series), with five minutes becoming 8 minutes, and then 10 minutes, and now I'm in the realm of 20-minute videos combining both overlapping still images with video of water, counterbalancing movement and stillness, sound and silence. These online videos are freely available to watch. Here are the two links: https://vimeo.com/channels/7daysofbeauty  https://vimeo.com/channels/breathingroomseries

ON TECHNOLOGY

I have long considered myself to be a neo-Luddite. The Luddites were an English movement during the Industrial Revolution who rebelled against the industrialization of life. And in that vein, as the great choreographer Erik Hawkins used to say repeatedly: "Just because something is possible doesn't make it desirable." 

And I think sometimes in this rush to make things faster, more refined, more technological, that we're actually training ourselves to be more distracted and less present, inhabiting a state of being that's injurious to our nature and our relationships. I don't use Twitter. I got off Facebook on my birthday last year. I do use Zoom as it's an amazing medium for connectivity, which is how I do the majority of my teaching these days. It's ideal for guiding people on inner journeys as participants can be at home in the safety and comfort of their own domain, with cameras turned off and voices muted. They can really just drop down into an intimate and sweet experience of their own bodies as I'm guiding and of course, it's cost effective and efficient. A lot can happen in an hour, when the conditions of safety, comfort and ease are present. 

Another aspect of being a neo-Luddite is in the use of very basic tools. I have a high-end consumer grade camera instead of a professional one as I don't want to worry about it in the elements, and I am fine with simplicity of choices. And I also use iMovie for my videos. I find that the simpler my tools, the easier it is to stretch my creativity. I'd much rather spend more time out in the field, enjoying the natural world and taking photographs, instead of sitting in front of my computer for hours making high-tech modifications to my work. 

One of the challenges of the modern world is most people don't have the choice to live rurally, and as a result, don’t have daily access to the natural world. But just like my attention to the small spaces of the natural environment, one of the best ways for people who live in cities to have a relationship with nature is to either: tear out that lawn in your yard and create a vegetable and flower garden, or join a community garden project. Just simply watching and being involved with the cycles of nature by tending a plot of Earth with dedication, creativity and love, is an antidote to the structures and strictures of modern life. Growing flowers and vegetables has constantly keyed me into the cycles of life, both internally and externally. Sometimes our psyches need to be fallow, and we just need to rest. Other times we're in a growth phase. Sometimes, we need to take the time to really nourish that seedling so it can take hold and prosper, and then trust its resiliency. 

The tending of a garden is a devotional practice to life. Having a garden and especially growing a lot of pollinators to increase the bee population where I live is a good thing for the common good. So gardens, whether your own or a community one, is a wonderful way to be involved in the soil beneath your feet and get back to basics. Conversely, in terms of the inner landscape, taking time each day, even if it's just 10 minutes, to go into your own breathing and sense of self, not really a formal meditation practice, just simply closing your eyes, attending to your breath, slowing things down and letting yourself tolerate the emptiness of not knowing. And I would say that overarching principle guides both my visual art and somatic art. How do we increase our capacity for the not-knowing and go into the mystery? Not sure where I'm going, but paying attention to what's arising, what inspires, what is exciting. 

Jamie McHugh

http://somaticexpression.com  http://www.naturebeingart.org

All images courtesy of Jamie McHugh.